ipad

Fortune offers some interesting numbers about digital magazines and tablet computing:

First, Apple has sold roughly 13-14 million iPads in the last nine months.

Second, when Wired rolled out its iPad app back in June, they sold 100,000 copies. By November they were down to 23,000.

Well, maybe. But it's hard not to think this is coming much too early and in a context that owes quite a lot too much to 20th century models, isn't it?

After all....

"...The conference itself was amazing, with attendees traveling from as far as Dubai and Germany to learn about tablet publishing from Dr. Mario Garcia, The New York Times, Time magazine, USA Today, News Corp., Adobe, Woodwing...."

Hmmm. Ok then.

Two must-read pieces about the future of text, and a useful follow-up. I'm not even going to try to summarize them, because they both touch on so many issues of central concern to the FFI. So I'll simply list them here, and recommend you make time for them:

Part one: Steven Johnson's The Glass Box and the Commonplace Book

Part two: Jeff Jarvis's iPad Danger: app v. web, consumer v. creator.

"The problem is much simpler: iBooks and Kindle.app are incompetent e-readers. They get in the way of the reading experience and treat digital books like poorly typeset PDFs.

We can do better. (We have to do better.)

But there's something beyond interface and design issues nagging at me: these applications are ignoring a core characteristic unique to digital text. They're ignoring the meta-data created as we move through and mark our e-books.

This essay considers two sets of questions:

So Penguin is talking about how tablets (read “iPads”) will lead to new forms of books. Their vision? Encarta, circa a decade ago. Really? This is what Penguin thinks people want from Pengiun? They’re going to try to go head-to-head with PopCap?